A new publishing solution for news orgs by WordPress

The parent company of WordPress.com is joining with other news industry leaders to develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations. The effort is designed to address some of the persistent obstacles to creating economically sustainable models for journalism, particularly at the local level.

Discussion

Sounds, essentially, like a sponsored/subsidized, hosted, distribution of WordPress:
Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems. Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them. So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers. It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it "an opinionated CMS:” it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.

@chrismessina Does it? What about:
"The effort will be fully funded by Automattic through the development period (which extends through Jan. 2020). After that, operating fees of between $1,000 per month and $2,000 per month will be applied to participating sites."
So you pay $1,000 to $2,000 and get what in return? What am I missing?

@chrismessina "Sponsored" for one year and then $1,000-2,000/mo? Their VIP Hosting is $500/mo if I'm not mistaken. All this is vastly overpriced! A WordPress resilient Kubernetes WordPress setup on DigitalOcean fronted with Cloudflare at $200/mo will be less than $500/month with more flexibility and power. On top, if the media is nonprofit, Cloudflare can offer their enterprise plan for free. Google also has a free service to news sites.

@tostartafire While I have my doubts about Newspack's actual usefulness, and was skeptical of Gutenberg because of the outrage I originally heard, I've grown used to it and quite like it. The user flow was different and had a small learning curve, of course, but I find it lets me write and write and then I can easily go back later and modify individual blocks because a new one has been made every time I hit `Enter`.